Google Project Hosting is all about helping software developers work together on source code, code reviews, issues, and wiki pages for technical documentation. In fact, the projects we host have collectively accumulated several million issue comments. Working together means that, from time to time, the ball is in your court and you need to respond to other users.

We send out notification emails to let the appropriate users know when an issue has been entered or a comment has been added to an issue, wiki page, or code review. These emails contain a link that allows you to enter your response in your project on code.google.com/p. But starting now, we are making it much easier and faster to respond to these comments by processing email replies that you send us.

So, check your inbox for new notification emails sent directly to you. When you see an email footer line that says that you can reply, just press the reply button in your email client, bang out a thoughtful response, and hit “Send”. Project committers and owners can even update an issue’s status and other values via email. For example, to let your teammates know that you are working on an urgent defect report that just came in, reply with:

Subject: Re: Issue 123 inyour-project: data loss when src == dst

Status: StartedOwner: your-email-addressLabel: Priority-High

Thanks for that detailed defect report. I never realized that we needto handle that case specially. I’m going to add a check for itright now.

Please try it out the next time you receive a notification email. If you have questions, see our documentation on inbound email and user groups.